Content farms (also called content mills or content aggregators*) are websites that solicit, and often compensate authors for, user-generated content like articles and videos, often of a how-to nature.
Sites considered to be content farms include:
Associated Content
Demand Studios
Suite 101
Squidoo
TextBroker
HubPages
Examiner.com
Answers.com
The content solicited by content farms is collected and displayed ("aggregated") on a content farm website, or it is licensed to partners, where it typically earns money via ad revenue (related ads are posted adjacent to the content, which users click).
Content farm compensation to authors can consist of a small flat fee or low per-click payments that can provide a minor supplemental income to writers, but that do not generally compare to professional freelance rates of pay.
Content farms usually solicit and are most inclined to approve content that is:
- Evergreen (relevant for a long period of time, not tied to a current event), and
- Likely to rank well in search engines, due to niche subject matter, effective keyword usage, and conformity to rules of search engine optimization.
Several mainstream news organizations have written articles about content farms that provide further perspective, including:
- Emperors and beggars: Can technology help make online content pay? The Economist, April 2010
- The Answer Factory: Demand Media and the Fast, Disposable, and Profitable as Hell Media Model Wired, October 2009
- Working for Demand Media: The Web's Biggest, Scariest Content Machine Time Magazine, March 2010
*Content aggregation can refer to many things, including RSS sites, news web sites, and any site that gathers content from different sources for the purposes of consumption via a single portal. Content aggregation does not necessarily indicate a site that solicits or compensates authors for content.
Do you write for content aggregator websites (also called content farms or content mills) like